Valentine's Day is a great time to re-emphasize the importance of letter-writing. If you been hanging around here for any length of time, you can attest that I'm a fan of old-fashioned correspondence. Once you read these inspiring passages from famous love notes, you'll be, too.

Once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me.*

— Johnny Cash to June Carter Cash

I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love.

— Frida Kahlo, to her fellow artist husband, Diego Rivera

What he feels, he told me, is a strange queer tight little twitchy feeling around the inside of his throat whenever he thinks that something is happening which will require so much love and all on account of you being so wonderful.

— E.B. White to his wife (in the perspective of the family dog) upon finding out she was pregnant

...should I draw you the picture of my heart it would be what I hope you would still love though it contained nothing new. The early possession you obtained there, and the absolute power you have obtained over it, leaves not the smallest space unoccupied.

— Abigail Adams, written to John Adams in 1782

Darling – I love these velvet nights. I’ve never been able to decide … whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night or perhaps in the lux of noon. Anyway, I love you most and you ’phoned me just because you phoned me tonight – I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me.

— Zelda Fitzgerald, written to F. Scott in the fall of 1930

The sweet sounds brought forth from the pianoforte by your clever hand can be enjoyed by twenty people simultaneously without diminishing at all the pleasure you so obligingly mean for me, and I could, with as little reason, demand from your affection that no other ears but mine be allowed to be charmed by those sweet sounds.

— Benjamin Franklin to Madame Brillon

Out of the depths of my happy heart wells a great tide of love and prayer for this priceless treasure that is confined to my life-long keeping. You cannot see its intangible waves as they flow towards you, darling, but in these lines you will hear, as it were, the distant beating of the surf.

— Mark Twain to his future wife, Olivia Langdon

*This was excerpted from a letter that Johhny Cash to June Carter in 1994 on her 65th birthday. According to a poll, his letter was named by The Independent as the "Greatest Love Letter of All Time." Read the whole thing here.